Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles-born writer and the author of three books. His most recent novel, The Barbarian Nurseries (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), won the 2012 California Book Award for Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book. He is also the author of the novel The Tattooed Soldier (Delphinium, 1998) and the non-fiction book Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (Riverhead, 2006).

Tobar is a veteran journalist; he was part of the team at The Los Angeles Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Los Angeles riots, and he has also worked as a foreign and national correspondent and columnist for The Los Angeles Times. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from UC Irvine.